


Stolen Fire

by bobbiewickham



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 12:36:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3173928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobbiewickham/pseuds/bobbiewickham
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joly comes to Combeferre with a problem, and gets bonus 'help' from Jean Prouvaire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stolen Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MaraschinoCheri](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=MaraschinoCheri).



“—and so I said to Grantaire, if you wish to stand on tables and sing the praises of Charles X to irritate Bossuet and me, be my guest, but don’t be surprised when we douse your thick head with bad wine.”

Joly was holding forth, with animation and gusto, his hands gesturing in the air nearly as quick as the words flying from his mouth. Every so often he’d remember to smile.

He was obviously much disturbed about something. Combeferre wished he would just say it, whatever it was, instead of trying to drown it in a stream of silly anecdotes. This resolute gaiety was becoming ghoulish.

Prouvaire, sitting cross-legged in a vaguely Oriental fashion, exchanged a glance with Combeferre, but kept silent.

Joly came to the end of his tale of Grantaire’s antics, and paused. There was a moment when he looked almost melancholy. He immediately tried to conceal it with a jibe: “Your skeleton is dusty, Combeferre. You should take greater care to keep her in order—”

“My dear Joly,” Combeferre interrupted, “what’s wrong?”

Combeferre could see the expressions play across Joly’s all-too-open face: chagrin at being caught out, followed by wavering between concealment and revelation, followed by a valiant attempt at good cheer.

“Nothing,” said Joly.

“It’s plainly not nothing, and you plainly _want_ to unburden yourself by telling me, and you’re most welcome to do so, as always, so you may as well get on with it and stop dithering.” Perhaps that was a bit harsh for a man in clear distress, but Combeferre was _busy_. He wanted to help Joly, but he also wanted to do so as speedily as possible, regardless of Prouvaire’s disapproving eyebrows.

Joly blinked, sighed, and flopped down on Combeferre’s couch. “Oh, very well. It really is nothing. Or nothing out of the ordinary, anyway.”

Combeferre waited.

Eventually, Joly began to talk. “I tried something new with a patient, the other day. A sailor. He had a dark spot on his shoulder—it began as just a mole—but it had grown to cover most of his upper back, and there were large speckles all over his back and legs.” Combeferre winced. “Cutting it out would have been—horribly painful. And—it _probably_ wouldn’t have even worked. The growth—well. It was both wide and deep. He didn’t want the knife, not under those circumstances, and I couldn’t blame him, so I tried something…unorthodox.”

“Which was?” Combeferre prodded, when Joly fell silent again.

“Oh—copper salts. It’s an old remedy, and relatively painless, but it’s fallen out of fashion, as you know. And so it’s become new again. I thought…” Joly shrugged. “I thought it might work. Gold salts are supposed to be even better, but I didn’t have those on hand. But it’s not working, Combeferre. He’s going to die in a day, maybe two.”

“Joly,” sighed Combeferre. “I needn’t tell you that you can’t save everyone—” 

“I could have bullied him into going under the knife. I didn’t. And the copper salts were _my_ idea. Not my professor’s, not the other students’. Mine.”

Combeferre left his chair to sit next to Joly on the couch. He felt unsettled himself. Perhaps he was so used to Joly’s mirth that he’d forgotten just how much iron determination lay behind it. Joly, after all, saw the same horrors as Combeferre.

He put a hand on Joly’s shoulder and tried to think of what to say.

“Do you think, if you’d kept quiet, your professor would have saved the patient’s life?” Prouvaire’s voice cut in with all the shock and sharpness of a blade. Combeferre had half-forgotten that he was there.

Joly looked at Prouvaire, who was leaning against the wall, still sitting on the floor. Prouvaire’s face was unreadable, his gaze steady and challenging. Combeferre, looking from him to Joly, thought they made a very poetic contrast as they sat opposite each other. Prouvaire, quiet, dark, and incisive; Joly, voluble, pale, and torn.

“No, I don’t,” said Joly, rubbing his nose. “But all the same—”

“But nothing,” Prouvaire interrupted. “You did your patient no harm—correct? You’ve just admitted that. And you had a creative thought, an inspiration, and put it into practice to benefit your patient, and to advance knowledge. Surely that—”

“He didn’t benefit.” Joly seemed near tears now. “He’s _dying_ , and I didn’t advance knowledge at all, because my idea was _wrong_. It didn’t help.”

“But now we know it didn’t,” Combeferre said. “That’s knowledge, just as success would be. This man’s death means something for science now, something more than it would have if he’d simply died after your professor handled things his usual way.”

Joly snorted. “Yes, I’m sure that’s a great comfort to him.”

“We all die,” Prouvaire said, and Combeferre suppressed a groan. He hoped Prouvaire would not turn morbid or apocalyptic right this very moment. “Well, we _do_ , Combeferre. Don’t look at me like a fly you want to swat.” Prouvaire was blushing. But he stubbornly went on. “Only the gods have that privilege, and they exercise it whenever they please. Each breath we take is stolen from their clutches. Like Prometheus’s fire. All of us reach a day when we can steal no more. Usually that day means nothing. It’s just a loss. But you, Joly—you turned this man’s last days into another attempt at kindling a flame in the darkness—”

“—and promptly snuffing it out,” Joly said. He rubbed his nose again. “I need a drink.”

Combeferre, glaring at Prouvaire, rose to fetch his one bottle of absinthe. The rest of his evening would be given over to getting drunk and managing his drunker friends, but there was no help for that now. The trouble with Jean Prouvaire, in Combeferre’s opinion, was that Prouvaire believed his _memento mori_ ramblings were as comforting to others as they were to Prouvaire himself. Though Combeferre had to concede, when he turned back with the absinthe and three glasses, that Joly did look livelier. Possibly he had found Prouvaire’s talk bracing, or soothing, or inspiring, after all.

More likely he’d found it funny. Prouvaire’s moods could be unintentionally comical. And Joly was skilled at extracting humor even from the tomb.

Prouvaire had moved to the couch. He sprawled with true Romantic abandon, his head propped up on Joly’s leg. Combeferre poured them each a glass of absinthe. He squeezed in on Joly’s other side, setting the bottle down on the floor.

Joly’s absinthe disappeared at moderate speed, and Combeferre relaxed. Joly would get drunk. That was certain. But he wasn’t reaching for self-obliteration, and so he would be well. 

* * *

It was two hours later when Courfeyrac and Enjolras knocked on Combeferre’s door. 

Courfeyrac heard shouts and giggles from within, and raised his eyebrows at Enjolras, who answered with a puzzled half-smile.

The door swung open to admit them. Courfeyrac took only one step inside before Joly pulled him into a very clumsy, very drunken embrace. “Courfey—courferrrrrrgh!”

Courfeyrac staggered. Joly wasn’t heavy, but he was hanging from Courfeyrac’s neck, and brute strength wasn’t one of Courfeyrac’s noticeable qualities. Silently, Enjolras moved to help him hold Joly upright.

“Enj-ol-ras.” Joly smiled widely, releasing Courfeyrac and flinging his arms around Enjolras.

“Well, at least he got your whole name out.” Courfeyrac glanced around the room, taking in Prouvaire—draped over the couch on his stomach, staring wide-eyed at the skeleton propped up in the corner—and Combeferre, nose-deep in a thick tome, muttering to himself, and holding his candle much closer to his book than any sober man would. “Oh, _hell_. Combeferre’s drunk—they all are. We’ll have to go over the pamphlet with him tomorrow.”

Courfeyrac swiftly confiscated the candle from Combeferre, who made a noise of protest. “Hush. Ten to one you can’t even understand what’s in that book right now, so why brave death by fire to read it?”

Enjolras guided Joly to a chair and came over to put his hand on Combeferre’s shoulder. “Perhaps you should sleep, my friend.”

“Cuvier is _wrong_ ,” said Combeferre, thumping his hand on the table. “Wrong and intransigent.”

“Yes, yes.” Enjolras looked much too fond for someone coping with a drunk. Courfeyrac supposed he understood, though. Some men, when drunk, cursed their fate, their women and their world. Combeferre simply grew louder and more passionate about science.

“They should all sleep,” Courfeyrac said. “And they must do so here, unless you feel inclined to shepherd Prouvaire and Joly back home. I’ll help if you do, but I don’t feel any great desire to stumble through the streets with these two lumps.”

“I can bring one of them to my room.” Enjolras lived in the same building as Combeferre, for greater ease of midnight conversation.

“Very well, take your pick—Joly seems more mobile than Prouvaire, at the moment.”

“Mmmm,” said Prouvaire. 

Joly, for his part, stood up, only to tangle his feet in the legs of the chair he’d just been sitting in. Enjolras slid an arm around his shoulders to keep him standing, and began to guide him out.

At the door, Enjolras paused, still supporting Joly, and turned back to Courfeyrac. “Combeferre doesn’t usually indulge like this. I wonder…”

“…what was the cause?” Courfeyrac finished.

Likely it was nothing good. Combeferre didn’t celebrate by drinking much. Courfeyrac could tell, looking at Enjolras’s face, that Enjolras had realized this too.

A grave mood had settled upon them now, despite the amusement of finding their three friends in such a state. But there was nothing to be done. “We can ask Combeferre tomorrow.”

Enjolras nodded. “Good night,” he said, and went out with Joly, leaving Courfeyrac to make sure the other two went to sleep without catastrophe.

He decided to leave Prouvaire on the couch, which was soft and comfortable, but Combeferre needed to move from his chair. “Come on, get up,” Courfeyrac said, coaxing.

Combeferre said very little as Courfeyrac helped him to his bed. But as Courfeyrac was slipping out, Jean Prouvaire came to life again. He stuck his head up, his eyes gleaming with the reflected light of the street lamp. “Joly was upset over a dying patient.” 

Courfeyrac, unsurprised, merely said, “Oh. I see. Good night, then.” Prouvaire made no reply, and Courfeyrac left, shutting the door behind him softly.

And Jean Prouvaire gazed at the skeleton long into the night, until sleep crept up on him at last.


End file.
